All posts tagged Minmetals

Chinese companies from home-appliance maker Haier Group to metal giant China Minmetals Corp. in recent years joined foreign insurers in setting up insurance joint ventures in China.

But their inability to break the dominance of China’s top insurers has led many of the Chinese partners—particularly those outside the financial sector—to retreat, and analysts said others are likely to do so. Read More »

The miner’s Hong Kong-listed unit finally got a foothold in Africa when it bought a copper mine in Congo in February, after it abandoned attempts to buy Canada’s Equinox Minerals Ltd.’s Zambian copper assets. Minmetals walked away from that deal, and Barrick Gold Corp. swooped inwith a bid that was 16% higher than Minmetals’ at 7.3 billion Canadian dollars (US$7.4 billion). As a state-backed firm, Minmetals was widely expected to pony up for the deal. Read More »

As Minmetals Resources Ltd. failed bid for Equinox Minerals Ltd. shows, just because a company is Chinese and state-owned doesn’t mean it’s got bottomless pockets.

Minmetals, which was suspended from trading in Hong Kong on Tuesday morning, announced later in the day that it would withdraw its offer for Equinox following a competing bid put forward by Canada’s Barrick Gold Corp. on Monday.

While some might be tempted to invoke the usual explanations of protectionism and national security, in this case the story is much simpler.

China is making one of its biggest pushes ever to acquire an overseas mining asset – and the deal looks like it has an unusually clear path toward approval. Earlier Monday, Chinese state-owned Minmetals Resources Ltd. announced its US$6.3 billion offer for Australian copper miner Equinox Minerals Ltd.

If it goes through, it would be the largest full takeover of an overseas company by a Chinese miner ever, according to data from Dealogic.

A daily list of the best of The Wall Street Journal’s China coverage and what the Journal’s reporters in China are reading and watching online. (NOTE: WSJ has not verified items in the ‘News Items’ section and does not vouch for their accuracy.)

In the latest sign China is on its way to consolidating its rare earths industry, the head of the country’s largest metal and minerals trading company threw his support behind government plans to consolidate the number of companies with access to Chinese rare earths.

The comments reinforce a message the Chinese government has repeated for months: Industry consolidation and stricter quotas are coming. At the same time, they’re a reminder of a simmering international trade dispute in which many countries – particularly the U.S. – contend the quotas are a violation of free trade agreements. Read More »

A spat between a newspaper owned by state-run Xinhua and a powerful state-owned company over a report on environmental pollution appears to have reached a truce.

On Friday, the Economic Information Daily said that in an interview with Sun Xiaomin, deputy manager of production safety and energy-saving emissions reduction for Minmetals, conducted by a reporter from Xinhua Insight, an investigative section of Xinhua, Sun acknowledged Minmetals’ role in the allegations of environmental pollution in Wuan, which the paper said had damaged crops and sickened residents. Read More »

Last week, China Real Time Report wrote about a story published by Economic Information Daily( our report in English here and in Chinese here), whose Chinese name literally translates as Economic Reference. Economic Information Daily was the first economic publication to be founded under the sprawling Xinhua umbrella after China’s economic reforms that began in 1978. Read More »

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